thank you to everyone who came to hardhack, it was a lot of fun. the solder fumes were pervasive! for once i wasn’t the only one who was completely and utterly obsessed with circuits *smile*. so thank you one and all, i really had a blast watching people help each other and get inspired to try something new in the way of hardware. if you document all or part of a project online which you showed me at hardhack, don’t forget to email about it. my photos of the event are here. thanks again for participating if you were there.

so with five weeks left to got before my race, i seem to have developed some sort of injury to my right quad, but i still managed to kick it into high gear today for some interval training. i thought i’d blog a bit about the garmin forerunner 50. (it is a non-gps based wireless device). i have the version with a foot pod pedometer. i grabbed it while in seattle and used it to clock my pace around green lake while i was there. it works wonderfully as a watch based pedometer for pace and distance. it doesn’t however, work so happily with mac or linux or bsd (yet. apparently mac software will be out at the end of this year). secondly, for doing something like my interval training of today, it isn’t so handy. it isn’t easy to switch between miles and meters for speed work, neither is it easy to track “x distance in x time” because the timer function only shows in timer mode which doesn’t let you watch the distance scrolling by. also, as far as i can tell, when you use the lap function while training, it doesn’t show you the current distance of the current lap. i could be wrong about this, but it certainly isn’t intuitive in the design. i was looking forward to the new garmin forerunner 405 gps based watches coming out in june, but if they are as stupid as this watch at interval training i think i will skip them completely. i hope garmin surprises me in a positive way. oh, and some way to get my data off the watch without running windows would be fabulous as well.

there is a preliminary schedule up for hardhack, things may change a little bit, and a few more workshops may be added, but at least it’s a start. *smile* sign up for hardhack if you are into soldering or hardware or just want to sniff some solder fumes in berlin. [pictured above: marc’s antenna mod for what i think is an rfid device which he showed me at cansecwest last week.]

i just thought i’d fan the flame a bit. both of these pics were taken in the last two weeks (photo credit top: elisa and photo credit bottom: verena). have you signed up for hardhack yet? the hardhack schedule will be up tomorrow.

i’ll also be giving a presentation at the girl geek dinner amsterdam next week on april 10th. if you are interested in attending, sign up info is on that site. if you are a guy, a girl that attends has to invite you. reverse sexism? perhaps a little, but it should be a fun evening. which reminds me, last week in vancouver at cansecwest, there was an after party that had more women than men, and all the women were geeks. that was the first time i can ever remember that happening naturally. i can’t wait until that is a common occurrence. say hi in amsterdam if you are around on the 10th.

i’ll be giving a talk at re:publica on friday here in berlin, come hang out and see what projects are on my life-long to do list. it’s nice to be back in town, somehow home is not just where the bandwidth is. i have plenty of stuff to blog about and a plethora of pics to share from my last three weeks of travels, more on that later. hardhack has a sign-up form, and the workshop list is shaping up to be incredible. in the meantime, come say hi on friday at re:publica.